Prison Diaries: Criminalising Oppositional Imaginations
By Uma Chakravarty
Sometime in the early 60s the film Bandini directed by Bimal Roy made waves among the cinema going public as its basic theme was the incarceration of the heroine, played by Nutan, who has killed the wife of the revolutionary hero and has been punished for her crime. While the unfolding of the story line makes us sympathise with the heroine, the most lasting impact of the film is the image of a woman grinding grain at the hand operated chakki as she sings of the babul she has been wrenched away from into the prison. “Ab ke baras bhej bhaiya ko babul” resonates with women in particular, perhaps because many women sing as they grind at the sasural and as they recall the natal home with nostalgia and pain. The song was picturised over a number of images of individual women, middle aged and young, standing alone against the jail walls, looking outwards through and beyond the jail bars. The prison house is not associated with women so it is something of a shock to think about women in jail whether they are there for violent crimes they may have committed or are there as “prisoners of conscience”. That is why the hero is a revolutionary in Bandini and the heroine an “ordinary” criminal who has been betrayed by the hero and has murdered his wife. Flipping it around is somewhat unimaginable in cinema, but there have been a number of revolutionary women who went to jail for the political stands they took in our recent history so it is surprising that these women have not been the subject of any film, either during the period of anti colonial struggles or in independent India. However as someone who has been part of the civil rights movement from the 70s onwards it is these women that I was drawn to and it was their lives that I wanted to explore: women who are or were jailed for their political work. I already had a wonderful take on jail experience in the national movement in the form of an unexpected account when I accidentally discovered the presence of Durga Bhabhi, an associate of Bhagat Singh, through a friend who knew her. Later when I launched myself into a film making phase I set about doing oral interviews with a range of women who went to jail in independent India beginning with the Telengana armed struggle in 1946-1949; Naxalbari and the Emergency in the late sixties and seventies; and then into the present where a range of movements are drawing women into them.
Prison Diaries, the first documentary I made on women’s experience of jail examined a number of themes that emerge from women’s experiences of being in jail, the violence that it entails and the ways in which women survive their jail time. What I had planned as a single film turned into a venture that ended with four different films because of the number of women that I managed to speak to over an six year period: Together they highlight the solidarities forged in jail among the political prisoners, but also with other women who are spending time for murders they have committed, or other types of crimes such as theft, trafficking, soliciting and so on. Some women kept a diary while in jail like Snehalata Reddy and others like Primla Lewis went on to write about their jail experiences in a realistic mode of recall after they came out. Some women became literary writers who turned their experiences of jail into loosely fictionalised accounts of women who survive their jail time through relationships forged with other women, or animals that went in and out of jail and make for emotional outlets as they negotiated the brutalities of jail life and allowed them to negotiate their time in jail. Drawing from my interviews and from the writings of women who were incarcerated for their political work and went on to write about women in prison I hope to draw attention to the somewhat unexplored space of the jail and what it means to be imprisoned, cut off from the world outside. I will draw from my interviews with over 35 women, but in particular I will focus on five women: Durga Bhabhi, Koteswaramma, Snehalata Reddy, Sundari and Dayamani Barla as all of them “wrote” their prison experiences up in some form and allowing us to share their time in prison.
Durga Bhabhi
The most lasting memory that I have of my time in jail was the first night I spent there. I was in solitary confinement as a political prisoner who was in B class as I was not formally educated, unlike all the other women political prisoners who were in a different class as they had degrees; they got food which was different from those of us who were ordinary prisoners. My cell was next to the morgue and I was all alone. I had smuggled pistols hidden in my clothes from Jaipur to Delhi, and had carried empty shells by train to the Punjab and never felt the kind of fear I felt that night alone, next to the morgue…(interview with Durga bhabhi, revolutionary associated with Bhagat Singh, conducted in the late 1980s; she was jailed in the early 1930s as part of the anti colonial struggle)
This description of the first night in jail is diametrically opposite to our image of a revolutionary, one who embraces a cause and is willing to take huge risks facing even death in pursuit of the dreams of a better world. I have used it here to enable me to draw an arc in the manner in which women experience prison, what they notice about the physical space of the prison and how they recall it in later years. What also leaves a lasting memory of jail life is what mediates that experience: were you there alone and away from your revolutionary comrades or in a group? How that experience is mediated by how the world outside regards your work and the cause which has led you to be noticed by the state and thus put away from the rest of society. In my listening experience of the interviews of incarcerated women these are critical to the way women recall jail time.
I
Koteswaramma spent a few months in a jail just before independence. She was part of a larger group of women, all comrades in the communist movement of Andhra/Telengana. As communist revolutionaries who were regarded as doing anti-state work of a special kind, different from the men and women who had swarmed the jails as nationalists in the struggle for freedom communist revolutionaries did both over ground work and underground work. During the late 30s and 40s there were large numbers of women in the communist movement which culminated in the Telengana armed struggle just before and after independence. For her the time in jail was mediated and humanised by the presence of comrades all of whom were in jail together the men in one part of the jail and the women in another. Koteswaramma, who had something of a stormy life as a wife and mother, all of which came up in her interview with me, became a particularly animated narrator when she described her time in jail. She began with an anecdote:
We were allowed to cook our own meals and the prison staff gave us rice and other rations. The men sent their share of the rations to us from their jail with the message “cook for us too”! The women sent the rations back saying “Cook for you too? We haven’t come to jail to cook for you! The government has given us a holiday! We will not cook for you.”
The men who didn’t know how to cook or more pertinently clean the rations before cooking ate food with mud and stones. The women then relented and cleaned the rations for the men but continued to refuse to cook which the men then learnt how to do.
The jail was turned into an extension of female time together. There was a mix of women in terms of age and backgrounds. Together they joked, played games shared experiences, mocked at the jail staff, subverted rules in their own way, argued with the jail staff and even chastised them for delays in providing them with neem twigs to clean their teeth. One day a young woman got fed up of the waiting so she climbed the tree which was next to the compound wall and threw down twigs for the others. The jail staff came running terrified of the possibility of an escape from jail for which they would be held responsible. The women had a good laugh at the terror of the jail staff.
But jail life was jail life, cut off from home and work. Like now and in times past the wheels of the law were slow to move. As the days turned into weeks and months there was no news of when the women would be tried. Fed up with the delays just a few days before August 15 1947 the women decided to go on strike refusing to eat till the cases came up for hearing. The jail staff tried to seduce them with the goodies they would get to eat on the 15th but the women stayed firm: “It’s not independence for us they said” and continued their hunger strike. Finally the cases moved and the women were released.
II
The story of Snehalata Reddy in prison is somewhat unique. It was the time of the Emergency when she went to jail and the time was infamously known as a time when there was no remedy for the arbitrary arrests: “no daleel, no vakil and no appeal”. Snehalata was an actress who worked mostly in theatre but had begun to act in films. She and her husband were close to Rammanohar Lohia and his socialist vision of a more equalitarian and humane India. Sneha was picked up as George Fernandez had evaded arrest and the Emergency state was looking for him. She was the only woman political prisoner in the Bangalore Central Jail and had a terrible time while the larger numbers of male political prisoners had a community of their own. Sneha was also asthmatic so her jail time was punctuated by bad bouts of asthma, the irrational tyranny she was subjected to with no available remedy for her imprisonment. She spent seven months in jail and was finally released on parole for a month. Just before the end of the parole she had a heart attack and died: in a sense she wrote her own release papers, like Stan Swamy did in recent times since the government of the day was beyond legal accountability.
While in jail Sneha kept a diary which was published after her death with an introduction by U.A. Anantamurty. My socialist friend and colleague Roma Mitra who was herself traumatised by the Emergency and had to go underground, and suffered severe health problems, brought me a copy which I filed away. Years later I retrieved it when I made a film on Snehalata Reddy which was titled Prison Diaries. This was the first of my prison films which itself was an outcome of my growing concerns about the incarceration of women for their political work in various fields. Since I was myself a product of the Emergency it was somewhat natural for me to want to make films on women political prisoners; my own history was entangled with them in some way.
In 2012 I began to document women who went to jail for their political work over a forty year period. Since I was already in my seventies I had a certain goodwill among the women who had been to jail over the last few decades of the 19th century and into the 20th century. My interviews began to widen my arc of prison films except that in the shrunk political spaces I have few places where they can be screened. But I can still write about them.
Here are two extracts from my prison interviews: Sundari an activist from the Kudankulam movement spent 3 months in jail had innumerable cases of sedition foisted on her and while in there read Periyar’s autobiography. Inspired by this she thought, I too can write my life and she did!
I don’t know how many cases were there on me; I was always followed by the police; I could not go out of my village . I have come out in bail in 13 cases. In many cases they gave bail to other but not me. Why? Because you are a militant, in sedition charges they said! The judge asked do you know what charges are on you? I said I don’t know. She said: It is sedition. I said what does it mean? He said they have arrested you because you are against development of the country, so you are against the nation. I laughed. It is my place, my life. I am the victim facing loss, he is getting profit, the persons facing losses are the one who will protest, how can the person who will benefit protest? I I am here to protest because I am facing danger. How can you say it is “desa droham?” Nobody asked us whether they could put the plant here, that there is this kind of danger, this is what you should do in danger …they didn’t even give us a small training! Suppose the plant bursts, who will come to my rescue? …I am not in the wrong in protesting; If you want to put a case, do so. The woman judge asked the police to reply to what I said. This was the 80th day. After this the police put another 4 cases, so that I won’t get bail. Again they took me to court. The woman judge asked again do you know what case is there against you? She said, you are said to have kidnapped the Collector of Tirunelveli. I said I have been in jail since 82 days. You should have put this case before these 82 days, if I had done so. I am in Tiruchi jail. He is in Tirunelveli. I am an ordinary woman. If I kidnapped a Collector, that means even a Collector has no protection in this country! How can you protect a nuclear plant? The judge immediately tore up the document. She said what is wrong in what she is saying? After 82 days you have put a case. Again they took me to court after a few days. I told the judge, I have 2 children. Please let me know how many cases are there on me, every few days they are putting a fresh case, Hear all the cases against me at one go, even if there are 1000 cases! The police is doing this because they don’t want me to get bail. The judge said to the police, put up all the cases against her, I give you 3 days. After 3 days I was taken again. The Inspector said, there is no case against her. “Then give her bail. Her case is in Madurai high court.” They gave bail. The way they gave bail is: In one single day there are cases in 3 different stations. Even a murderer gets bails in 48 days, whereas, I was stuck in Madurai for 3 and a half months. I had to stay in Madurai. I could not go home. I could not understand what this government is. This PM he goes to foreign countries, and tells them, make a deal, make a deal. Isn’t this desa droham?. I am saying don’t kill people in the name of science. Electricity is important for a country. But you can‘t kill me and give electricity to people. They are saying they will build another 8 plants. Kerala has refused to take it. Why? Why did Andhra, Karnataka say no. Kerala wants the power, not the plant. People should think a little. Why would I destroy myself to give you power? What if 10 villages die for the good of the country, they say. When even an animal dies we have the right to put a case against the killer. When the goverment gives so much respect to five sensed animals why not six sensed humans? Who will compensate the losses?
And here is Dayamani Barla
The first time I went to jail I realised that in today’s times people who work for the public are thrown into jail. If you stand with the people against the government’s anti-people actions and policies it is certain that you will be sent to jail some time or the other. All my life I have been part of movements for justice, be it the Koel-Karo movement or the movement against the Mittal Company, against large dams and against illegal land acquisition, I always stand with the public in their struggles. The land mafia and the dominant sections are the ones who always stand with the system and the establishment. The system does not comprise only government machinery. In today’s date many people are running and controlling the system, people who kill the common people’s rights, who kill the common people, who snatch the food from others and hog it themselves, who demolish others’ homes to build their own mansions. These are the people who are running the system today and this system is always thinking of ways to crush you and hold you in its control. So for many days the government had been looking for the means to teach me a lesson, and it got the opportunity in 2012 when I had come to Nagri village 16 km from Ranchi, where agricultural land was being forcibly acquired through police force for IIM and other government institutions, and the villagers were opposing this. The government was lying that the land had been purchased, had already been acquired. I took out the IIM records under RTI. And it was confirmed that the land had not already been acquired. The farmers had not taken money for the land and the villagers had been continuously opposing this land acquisition. Then I felt that I should support them and I tried to help their struggle through the information I had got through RTI. We were continuously asking the government not to acquire agricultural land, cultivable land for building educational institutions and other government constructions, but to use alternative uncultivable fallow lands for such purposes, where population won’t be disturbed and this would lead to sustainable development in its true meaning. But the government refused to pay heed, so we also refused to bow down; what is wrong in this? If the government doesn’t want to give justice to the villagers, we would also struggle relentlessly for justice. So the government was waiting for a chance to target me. In 2006 I along with the villagers agitated for job cards in NREGA and organized a road block that ‘obstructed government work’. A warrant was taken out against me and I was arrested in order to ‘teach me a lesson’.
- So how was your experience in jail?
- I was in the Jharkhand Central jail, which is the main jail in Jharkhand. 80% of the inmates are innocent and have been jailed for petty matters, they are facing big cases for small matters like plucking jackfruit from a tree, stealing a chicken, etc. Say, if simple common people have a dispute or a couple of arguments with someone, they are straightaway booked on a half murder case. My experience was what we have been saying all along…that those who commit murders are roaming free, those who destroy national property are roaming free, those who work against the Constitution are roaming free and being honoured, whereas common people are being jailed for petty offences and the police and administration make these small issues into huge ones and punish them with life imprisonment. I am astounded that 95% of the women in jail are adivasi women; 60% of these women don’t know what their offence is, why they are in jail and why they are being punished, but they have been incarcerated in murder cases. I came to be aware of all these things while I was in jail…
In recent years even young women who were part of the NRC have been jailed on trumped up charges. Once in jail it takes years to get them out, for even bail to be granted as the case hearings go on and on over many years. We need to have a movement to challenge the laws that allow cases to be filed, and the courts not hear the bail pleas: constitutional values have been thrown into the dustbin. In the meanwhile Gulfishan writes from her jail cell: I never remembered dates in school: now all I remember are the tarikhs we get for hearings! The young women are learning political lessons in the hardest possible way. That is the tragedy of our times. It is tough to bear witness in times like this.